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You could add to this story remembrance of the fact that the Chicago Sun-Times was alone among all of the large metropolitan dailies in NOT sending any correspondents to cover the initial outbreak of the Iraq war many years ago. That decision, as I recall, was also due to cost-saving decisions, made at the Sun-Times by the the regime of Lord Conrad Black and his minions. The current situation at the Chicago Tribune is distressing, not just because it reflects poor decision making by the new management but also because it is driven by marketing, not editorial.

I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that the Tribune has pulled out of Iraq. The Tribune just combined its foreign reporting with that of its other newspapers. The Tribune newspapers still have a bureau in Iraq (at least I assume they do since there regularally is a Tribune story in the paper). The company still has foreign reporters, just not as many as they did recently.

There's a big difference between the Tribune and Tribune Co. The latter may or may not have a staffed bureau in Iraq, but the Tribune doesn't. And that makes a big difference. The Tribune (the paper) now has no foreign correspondents. Of the few that remained before the combination IAC speaks of, 2 went to the LA Times and the rest were asked to come home. Some refused. In the absence of any overseas presence--and pretty much like any other parochial newspaper--the Tribune feels much less bound and committed to the distinguished foreign coverage that Michael Miner mentions. It shouldn't be that way, maybe, but that's just the way it works, and the numbers reflect that. By the way, let's not lose sight of the fact that the Tribune was making money before they slashed their staff. Granted, they're in bad shape due to the Zell-imposed debt load, but it's not exactly clear that transforming a once-prestigious label into a fluffy community rag is the best course. The sharp drop in circulation despite the "redesign" strongly suggests that it isn't. One last word on Evan Osnos' observations: Focus groups are a lousy, lousy way to evaluate many things, and the Tribune people know this. They wanted certain cheapo results, and they got them. I was reading on the Poynter site about a study of newspapers that have ceased print operations, in whole or in part, in favor of an online product. The expectation was that print readers would follow the papers online and boost readership there. For the most part, though, this hasn't happened. In fact, some papers actually have seen a decline in online readership after dropping paper and ink. Why would this be so? I don't know, but I'd speculate that once a paper goes out of print--abandoning an exclusive medium with many generations of tradition behind it--most of what's special about the product disappears. The online presence is, then, just another online presence--and there are zillions of those out there. So perhaps what is so very special about newspapers is that they are news on paper with even a certain towering fustiness that, in a media environment saturated with rapid-transit garbage, appeals just because it's old and established, stable and accountable in a way that absolutely nothing else is or can be. So even though focus groups (and maybe readers in general, though I wouldn't concede the point) say they don't care a fig about foreign news, it may still have great value. The very fact that a newspaper HAS foreign correspondents--or national correspondents or its own Washington bureau, all artifacts of the glory days of powerful, authoritative journalism on paper--tells the world that it's a publication to be reckoned with. Even if a reader seldom reads foreign stories, their very presence in the paper imparts weight and authority to everything else, including the local news, that appears there. And it does so just as much for readers who don't care as it does for those who do. So when Zell and his people cast off decades of tradition and pride at the Tribune, they run a hell of a big risk, in addition to trashing what was once a world-class operation. It's much like going online exclusively, rendering yourself just another fragment of flashy flotsam in the cybersphere. Of course, this will be the Tribune's next big move.

I have absolutely noticed that the Tribune's foreign coverage has declined since they combined their operations with the L.A. Times. This is even factoring out the fact that they probably reduced the number of pages devoted to foreign news at around that time. The foreign articles are generally less interesting and seems to serve more of a purpose of covering events rather than explaining what is occuring overseas. But there is no reason for that to occur simply because the Chicago Tribune itself no longer has foreign staff. My guess (based on no personal knowledge) is it has more to do with turf wars within the company. The Tribune newspaper not having its own foreign editors probably creates a lack of commitement to create the best quality product in this area. It is my understanding that the L.A. Times still has a reasonably large foreign staff compared with most newspapers. I could be wrong but I believe they might have more foreign journalists than the Tribune did at its peak. So there is no reason for there to not still be good international reporting. You mentioned a few days ago that more of the L.A. Times's foreign reporting goes in that newspaper than the Tribune. The era when every major newspaper had its own foreign bureaus is over. That was inevitiable and is the way it has to be. Newspapers are no longer flush with cash and it is no longer an option to operate inefficiantly. There still is plenty of foreign reporting. Significant foreign staffs are still present at The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, the Tribune company, McClartey, Time, Newsweek, CNN, the AP, Reuters, Fox News, Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, ABC, and others. And that is just U.S. news organizations. There also are many based in other countries, such as The Economist. I don't think that foreign news is anywhere near the top of the list as to what has suffered the most as the result of the troubles in the industry over the past few years. In fact, I think someone who cares very much about foreign news would rather have the choices available today than 15-20 years ago in the pre-internet era. At that time there was not an easy ability for anyone at any time to read articles from any publication. Everyone was stuck with whatever their newspaper decided to print and except for the occasional good foreign news report on television (which you didn't have a choice of when to watch) that was about it. Since people are now able to get their foreign news from anywhere whenever they want it makes sense for newspapers to adjust to this fact. There no longer is the market for as much foreign news in the newspaper as there was then. So The Tribune is right to focus on local news where the reader has much fewer options and thus expects more from them. Obviously, many people who remember the old days have emotional attachments to the Tribune's large foreign staff. But that doesn't make it good business sense. And it really doesn't mean that all that much is lost from causing people to need to get more of their foreign news from the several dozen other news organizations that still provide it. That certainly doesn't mean that the Tribune (company) should get out of foreign reporting entirely. And I'm not sure it makes sense for the Chicago Tribune to decrease both the quantity and quality of its foreign news to the extent it has. I assume there are plenty of subscribers for whom this has caused or will cause them to decide it isn't worth it to receive the Tribune on their doorstep. As a result of stupid business decisions by almost every newspaper, they need to convince people to pay for the printed product instead of just reading the online product they decided to give away for free despite recieving much less advertising revenue. For people to continue to subscribe, they must feel they can flip around and see good articles about many subjects. So they have to make sure they don't destroy their international coverage too much. But there is no doubt that they could not continue to pretend it was 1985 and have the level of foreign news and staffing that they once had.

IAC makes a lot of good points. It's just that I think there may be good counterpoints that usually aren't taken into account. For one thing, foreign and national bureaus never made good business sense. Back when newspapers had 30 percent profit margins, they could have maybe jacked those up a few more percentage points by dumping national and foreign bureaus. So in that way, any kind of decent journalism itself has never made good business sense because it always has denied a quick and maximal return to shareholders. Beyond that, two more points, one of which IAC notes. When a paper dumps its national and foreign staffs, it dumps not just correspondents but also editors--in fact, a whole editing structure. Lost with this is expertise but, more than that, an institutional commitment to non-local news. Literally, no one with any pull or gravity is there during news meetings to make a strong case for national and foreign coverage. No one is there at budgeting meetings to make sure that national and foreign get a big slice of the pie. Sure, as IAC notes (and I did as well), it shouldn't be this way. But this is how institutions function. And it's partly justifiable these days, since the argument can always be made that readers have access to more non-local news online than they would ever get in the paper. Which leads me to the next point. The reason readers have so much access to so many sources is also a very big reason fewer and fewer newspapers are now able to sustain national and foreign bureaus and are endangering the medium itself. Suicidally, they're putting all their best stuff ONLINE FOR FREE. As Stephen Colbert says, that's a tough business model. So right now, there's this brief, glorious window in time when readers can access the best national and foreign reporting of the best publications in the world, all without paying a dime. Sweet. But there's an excellent chance it's not going to last much longer as one of the major categories of news sources diminishes and disappears. Finally, even under the current model, with all that online access, I'm not sure the average reader is better served. Before the Internet, a newspaper like the Tribune had wire access to the stories of other major newspapers (sort of like the online access everyone has now, but a few hours earlier). Thus every night, the Tribune (or the LA Times or any other big paper with national and foreign chops, and many not so big) would know what the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others would be offering up in the next day's editions. So the staff dedicated to national/foreign news would get busy and put together the best package they could using their own resources as well as those available from the wires. The result the next morning was a well thought out package of news from around the nation and world, presented with a lot of care as to relative importance and gravity--some of it analytical, some in-depth--all in a single, convenient, portable package. This is called editing. For all but the wonkish reader, I believe, it was superior to the enormously time-wasting morning online pursuit of the poorly aggregated, badly presented, unaccountable, scattered assortment of stuff available online. So for structural, institutional and financial reasons, newspapers can't (or won't and never will) just pretend it's 1985 and devote a significant chunk of a much diminished staff and an even more diminished news hole to non-local news. As with any other product, you need the people, the resources and the commitment. And that just isn't there anymore. As I noted, the Tribune and most surviving newspapers across the country remain solidly profitable--and were profitable before they began dumping staff and remote bureaus as fast as they could (sort of like the crew of the Titanic tossing women and children overboard so the captain and officers could have the lifeboats). The revenue trendlines don't look good, but we're in the middle of a heavy recession, and the media environment is still sorting itself out. If there were but one newspaper editor in the whole country who was worth one goddam and was willing to fight aggressively for his or her product, the industry might have a future. The newspaper as a medium is a sort of Empire State Building (or Tribune Tower) among trailer parks and strip malls. It's a little dated but a landmark whose value, I believe, only grows as crappy or questionable media blight ever greater expanses of the cognitive landscape. So why is the industry accelerating plans to tear it all down and put in yet another strip mall? Beats me.

I have to say that Filkins's attitude towards the general public isn't too flattering. I'm not sure of the criteria he's using to say that the war's fortunes have reversed, but those I know who were against the war from the start still read Iraq coverage, and those I know who were for it do as well. But in the interim, there's also more stories on Afghanistan, there was an election that probably took a couple of column inches away from the Iraq war, and there was an economic situation that left many folks out of work, maybe losing their homes, that sort of thing. There's other news out there, much of it impacting us. People are engaged with the news. So perhaps when folks say they're tired of the Iraq war, they mean exactly that.

Information revolution aside, Americans historically have turned inwards during times of economic hardship. It takes editors of true courage and vision to make a commitment to international news during these troubled times, realizing that it is exactly at these junctures in history when American readers' lives are most exposed, most vulnerable, to now ignored and incresingly unpredictable global trends--think of the worlwide Depression and the run-up to WWII. If ever we need a broader, clearer window on the the interconnected world we live in, it is now, when we are no longer as buffered from it by our wealth. Unfortunately, most newspapers these days have been taken over by corporate marketers and callow young technocrati. They aren't journalists. They are parochial sales clerks. Granted, they know how to sell more shoes. But they can hardly be called visionary, or brave, or worldly. And they certainly don't know how the planet works beyond their downtown apartments or leafy 'burbs. Hope they enjoy their coma while it lasts.

In today's AP report on Tribune Co.'s inexplicable victory on the bonus front, CFO Chandler Bigelow III, "noted that none of the company's newspapers lost money last year, and that 21 of its broadcasting stations gained advertising market share. He also said managers implemented strategic initiatives expected to generate $425 million in annualized cash flow and completed deals generating more than $1 billion in proceeds." Let's henceforth debate such issues from this premise, not one that presupposes newspapers are in such dire need of downsizing they must cease publishing real news. It's a bogus argument. Ninety-nine percent of all Tribune employees and no subscriber agreed to assume the excessive debt with which the company has been saddled. Nor did they have a say in the direction taken by the Chicago Tribune's current braintrust (and I use that term advisedly). These atrocities were greased by a gaping loophole in tax law and the greed of one scumbag mogul. Want to read about what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan? Check out the BBC. Even the NYT suffers by comparison.

Excellent points re the Tribune bonuses, gdretzka. And it backs up what those who've been paying attention have long known: Newspapers continue to make money, and many are doing quite well. I strongly suspect that the chieftains of the industry are using the Internet as little more than a club to scare the bejesus and beat concessions out of their employees. It's a slightly updated version of using the old excuse of rising newsprint prices to cut costs. . There was something on the Poynter site a few months ago about the once-proud but now bedraggled Kansas City Star, a tissue-thin ghost of its former self these days. The editor (or maybe it was the publisher) actually ran a little item in the paper noting that friends and acquaintances would approach him at parties and other gatherings with expressions of sympathy for the sorry state of the paper and the awful prospect that it might go under any day. The editor (or publisher) said he would then reply that, far from going under, the Star was actually profitable and doing quite well. No need to worry. But if that's the case, the obvious follow question from his concerned friends should have been, why is the paper a mere shadow of what it once was? Why is it necessary to discard wave after wave of editors and reporters if the damned paper is so damned profitable? As these journalists who are being shown to the door they told that, financially, things are really hunky dory but the shareholders just want bigger dividends or the genius executives need bigger bonuses to incentivize them to stay on so they can concoct even more plans for screwing readers and the people who actually put out the paper?

And, here, ladies and gentlemen, is the punchline to the joke begun earlier today, when a judge approved bonus payments to the dozens of kiss-asses and lackeys overseeing the destruction of Tribune's papers and broadcast outlets. Again from the AP: "(Judge Kevin Carey) denied authorization for the Tribune to make more than $2 million in severance payments to more than 60 employees laid off shortly before the Chicago-based company filed for bankruptcy protection. ... "In the separate severance pay ruling, Carey said that while he sympathized with the laid-off employees, he was constrained by the law from approving the payments. The judge did grant approval for severance payments to two employees laid off after the bankruptcy filing but before implementation of a post-petition severance policy. "On the severance pay motion, however, Carey sided with the trustee, concluding that Tribune had not demonstrated that the payments were essential to the operation of the company. ... "Assertions by the company and its creditors that the outstanding payments were a 'distraction' and that failure to make good on them could lead to 'bad press' were not sufficient justification, the judge said." Carey thereby willingly took the fall for the Tribune execs who didn't want to pay out the severance benefits, anyway. Is this a great country, or what? Lest one forget, Tribune ceased being a Chicago-based company once it moved its official base of operations to the "Screw You" state of Delaware. The happened well before the current regime took over operations. Even so, Tribune company taxes -- such as they are -- go to paying the judge's salary ... you expected a different verdict, perhaps?

how many times will this same thing be written before Mike acknowledges that Chicagoans are getting more foreign news than they ever did - just not from the Trib. On a more interesting front, the Trib is reporting that Conscious Choice reporters are reconstituting the magazine after their corporate owners shut them down. Do Trib ad and circulation people have non-compete clauses? Is anyone in editorial starting to talk to the business side people. Hell, why not just abandon ship and leave Zell to his own devices, while starting anew. The Trib is just a collection of writers and business practices -- it's almost all intellectual capital.

Gredtza, The judge is just following the law. If you don't like the law then convince congress to change it. Don't blame the person who is performing his sworn duty to administer the bankruptcy laws in this case. Severence payments to laid-off employees may be nice (and I certainly do sympathize with them) but they are not essential to the operation of the company. Bonus payments to top executives, it seems to me, very well may be essentual to retaining and encouraging the talent neccessary to allow the business to thrive once it emerges from bankrupcy. At.Tribune The Kansas City Star is owned by the McClathy company. The McClathy company is certainly not in good financial shape: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MNI#chart1:symbol=mni;range=5y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined As you probably know, they are in danger of going bankrupt. Like the Tribune, they are in their desperate position more because of the debt they took on (in their case, aquisitions) then their operational issues. I do agree with you that most newspapers are not in quite as catastrohic a state as some people act. If McLatchy does indeed file for bankruptcy it is not as if they are going to immedietely cease operations. And there was an idiot who wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly that acted as if there was a serious possiblity that The New York Times would go out of business or transition to a small web-only operation as early as this summer. A number of newspaper companies are still profitable, some with pretty healthy profits, and this is during an economic downturn. But the trendlines are unmistakable. Readership is transitioning pretty quickly from print to the internet and the newspapers do not have anywhere remotely close to the amount of internet revenue to sustain themselves once this transition gets more pronounced. And there is no sign that they will anytime soon, even when the economy improves. A newspaper reader online creates only a fraction of the amount of potential advertising as a print reader. This is a very serious situation for newspapers and if they don't figure out what to do about it they will either be out of business or a shell of their current self in 6 to 8 years. Most of them still have some time and don't have to panic and make decisions that have a great potential to be counterproductive. But it is naive to act as if newspapers still make plenty of money and they should not be asking serious questions as to how they can operate more efficiantly. It is not the time to say that newspaper staff reductions are simply a result of executive greed, as some have here, nor certainly is it the time for people to make the old argument that newspapers are a public trust and that some decisions should not be made based on profit. One would think the time for that discussion is over. The most obvious remedy for the situation is for the newspapers to charge for their online content. This will encourage people to go to the edition that generates far more revenue, their print product. And they will be able to make more money than they do now from those who use the online product. They also need to make far more investments in experiments as to how they could improve online advertising. The current system where people have an enormous incentive of ditching the far more profitable print product for the free online product needs to end. I think most (or at least a good portion of) people of any age prefer reading a printed newspaper to a digital version. And they will do so if it costs about the same or only a little more. But until these things are done and prove successful, these companies need to be very concerned about their future and they it is essentual that they take steps to minimize their cost structure. I was pleased to see that the Tribune's latest round of layoffs seem to have been done on a rational basis. They don't seem to be decreasing their features reporting, for example. They are just using more freelancers and thus lowering the costs of this reporting. And they seem to be making efforts at operating their newsroom more efficiantly by combining departments and elimanating duplicative positions across its newspapers. This needs to be done carefully. It was mentioned earlier in the thread, for example, how not having people foreign editors in the Tribune newsroom may be hurting the foreign coverage in the paper. But there is no reason this should be the case. Easy organizational changes can be made to assure that foreign news continues to be interesting and innovative.

at.Tribune, and also IAC, great discussion. I would take exception to the statement "finally, even under the current model, with all that online access, I'm not sure the average reader is better served" made by at.Tribune. The issue is that readers are engaging with other sources, sometimes even joining in a community to add greater depth to the initial report, as you clearly have to the seminal statements by Michael Miner. This story, a blog actually, will not appear in print and is far, far richer and deeper due to the comments you and IAC have made. I would debate whether a local newspaper, without an Internet presence, is adding as much value to a reader as a newspaper with an interactive community of readers. I think it is clear that while reader comments can damage a newspaper's reputation, if it is properly managed the on-line community adds a depth that newspapers alone will never approach. Again, this blog entry is a case in point. And, I would debate that on-line readers are being poorly served. In fact, I would argue that it is print readers who are now being poorly served. They are fed a daily dose of old news in a format stressed for space. And, these readers are paying premium dollars for the privilege. One of the ideas behind the growth of the Chicago Tribune was to create a unique Midwest voice on national affairs. If the Colonel is still right about a unique Midwest voice on national and international affairs, someone will create it. But, I think I have more in common with one of those Indian tech workers than a McClean County corn farmer. I think that means more trouble for foreign/ national desks and their workers.

re: IAC. First the bonuses: At the risk of parroting Bill Maher and dozens of other comedians and pundits, when commenting on the bonuses paid to the geniuses at AIG, why worry about retaining "top executives" when any kid with a lemonaide stand could have done at least as good a job at Tribune Co. in 2008? Moreover, having worked with several of the people now ensconsed in editorial positions in the Tower, I can say without reservation that most of them couldn't lead a 4th of July parade, let alone a company out of bankruptcy. Historically, bonuses have been paid to Tribune executives not only for performance and profitability -- LOL, here -- but for toeing the line on company policy and persecuting "problem" employees. (And, yes, that's included fabricating job evaluations.) As for bankruptcy law and Congress: well, there is a reason that companies flock to Delaware to file their articles of incorporation, and not California or Massachusetts. Federal law is vague and capricious. Corporations know they'll get the benefit of the doubt in Delaware, just as some states are more or less lax on the terms of workman's and unemployment compensation. Anyone who believes otherwise hasn't been paying attention. On severance: If the 60 employees' severance packages constitute roughly the same drop in the bucket as the bonus payouts, how, IAC, is one pittance more important than the other to the company's future? Was it a coin-flip decision? Was the judge oblivious to the high quality of employee let go and the questionable attributes of employees retained? Probably. No matter that the fired employees were coerced into signing severance agreements -- and, in some cases, confidentiality clauses -- that likely will prove to be worthless, in any case. These were contracts, after all, and, as such, should have been binding. In many cases, those severance agreements might be the only things separating a fired employee from poverty and despair. Unless IAC has faced such dire consequences, he/she might consider sparing us his/her legal and ethical opinions. Or, at least, he/she might have the decency to use something approximating a real name when blogging on the concerns of real people. As for the point about

Only time will tell how well the executives performed in 2008. I don't see anything to indicate that "any kid with a lemonade stand could have done at least as good a job" The way I see it, there are three main reasons why the company is in bankrupcy. The first, Sam Zell made a stupidly structured deal to buy the company that brought on an enormous amount of debt. The blame for that is on Sam Zell and Sam Zell alone. As far as I know, none of the executives whose bonuses were being discussed were involved with that. Second, there is a major recession that has caused a drop in revenue that is enourmously higher than anticipated. Thirdly (and this often gets overlooked), I think the management of the company in the pre-Zell era was rather poor. From my anecdotal observations, the Tribune company has always seemed to me to be very conservative and lacked much innovation. Like almost every other newspaper company, they made the stupid decision to give their product away for free online. The Chicago Tribune's website is very poorly designed and does not do much to encourage people to go from story-to-story or to view advertisements. Until fairly recently, CLTV basically just repeated a newscast every half hour. They did despite the fact that national cable news networks proved that the best way to generate viewership was to actually have discussions about the events of the day. CLTV continued with this stratagy even after the internet made the ability to watch a newscast at any time of day to be a much less unique product. There was nothing to distinguash their news from any of their competitors except for their inferiority. I've always felt that WGN television was rather old and stale. It may have generated a lot of revenue but this seemed to be from legacy issues rather than good management (we see that they are currently attempting to reinvent the superstation to be a strong national network, something that should have happened years ago). Until a couple of years ago, Metromix was one of the worst designed websites I have seen. The company had many assets that generated a lot of money but they really didn't to much to invest in the future. Some moderately successful divisions were created in the 1990s but management seemed to be content with only moderate success. They didn't seem to take steps to make sure the company thrived in the long-term. People can say what they want about Zell and his people, but at least they are trying to reinvent their products. We see this, for example, with the redesign and the single-copy tabloid format of the Tribune. With the exception of the deal to buy the company, I don't see how very many of the current problems can be blamed on Zell his top management. One year is not a lot of time to put your stamp on a company. From what I have heard, for example, efforts are being made to redesign and improve the Tribune's website but that has not occured yet. The current website is the product of the old regime. And we haven't really seen whether the reorganiztion of staff and the changes made to the print editions will end up helping the company. I think the former management deserves more of the blame for the state the company is in than the current management. So it doesn't seem to me to make sense to deny bonuses to current executives that the company feels is neccessary to retain. I never stated that the severance packages should have been elimanated. I was just responding to your critisism of the judge. It looks to me that the judge is just following the law and seems to rather clearly be doing it correctly. So those who think this is unfair should blame the law and the people who wrote it, not the judge. Obviously it is ludicrous that bankrupcy cases like this are decided in a Delaware court based on Delaware law. And yes, the reasons for this seem to be because Delaware purposely has laws that attract companies to incorperate there. If you are angry about the rejection of the severance packages, I would suggest it is more productive to talk to your congressmen and the senators and suggest that they make this type of corporate law completely federal. And you could suggest that in situations like this that the laws make it so a judge should have more power to allow the implementation of severance packages. Nobody, of course, is happy that the employees were denied severance pay. I certainly would rather they received it. I was just taking issue with your decision to put the blame on the judge. I'm sorry that you had such a reaction to my opinion.

@IAC, Wilson and Lou Grant Thanks for the thoughts! Re McClatchy's sorry state, I think in all cases we have to look at why media companies are teetering, not just at the fact (if indeed it's a fact) that they are. If they're losing money, why? If they're still making profits but are somehow in peril, why? And the raison d'etre for big media companies like McClatchy is that they're supposed to strengthen, not weaken, local properties. If the Kansas City Star is indeed profitable, its big, distant corporate owner shouldn't be pulling it down, should it? As for the idea that readers are much better served by the internet and discussions like this, I'm not so sure. SOME readers clearly are. But I doubt that most are. I don't know how anyone could ever measure this, and maybe I'm just being sentimental, but I think the medium counts every bit as much as the message. The very fact that the internet opens up such enormous scope for news (again, a good deal of which will disappear if newspapers and newsmagazines vanish) and the fact that it allows people to customize their news so that they get only what (they think) they want is both a weakness and a strength, as I humbly see it. And the weakness has to do with the fact that there's no single, stable, authoritative, locally based beacon of news and opinion. Now, maybe no one really needs that anymore. Maybe someone sitting in Chicago really does have more in common with an Indian tech worker than a McClean County corn farmer. But I don't think so. We're so bedazzled by globalization and the internet itself, I think, that we lose sight of the fact that, locally, we really do have a lot more cultural, economic and other ties than we like to acknowledge. Col. McCormick's vision of a distinctive national voice for the Tribune, sadly, either was never achieved or was abandoned. If the Tribune itself ever did provide that Midwestern voice (as, after all, the biggest voice in the Rust Belt), we might have realized not only those powerful but otherwise unremarked ties with our neighbors but also the great worth of the Tribune itself.

I imagine the end of Reconstruction was something like this. At the point where southern white folks shooting up black elected officials and voters on election day was no longer interesting and outrageous, but just common, the Klan had won.

So I see the IRS is looking into whether Zell's manipulation of the Tribune Co. ESOP to buy the company at little risk to himself was actually in the interest of the employees: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=34007&seenIt=1 If the IRS determines that it wasn't (as everyone else aware of the deal--probably including Zell--has already concluded), one wonders what this will mean for the Labor Dept. investigation and the LA Times lawsuit that are also challenging Zell's uncanny arrangement.

Good discussion, for the most part. But there are some critical missing points. No, IAC, the Tribune is NOT right to focus solely on local news -- that merely encourages an already inherent provincialism and insularity too many Americans have. You'd think we'd have learned from 9/11 how important it is to know what's going on elsewhere and how small and interlocked the world really is ... but no, how quickly we forget. Newspapers that covered foreign news extensively were a bulwark against such provincialism, even though it's been a constant battle. That counterbalance is eroding, however. Second, it's not really the same when someone from another country reports on foreign news -- that's part of why it's good to read coverage from both foreign and domestic media. On the other hand, part of what correspondents for local media did was catch the occasional angle in foreign news that might have a local tie-in, something a foreign reporter from a foreign news outlet would be unlikely to see. I guarantee you that someone covering India for the BBC isn't going to look for what famine there might mean to grain sales in Illinois, but somebody here might want to know that. A good foreign reporter from a U.S. paper knows how to connect the dots for readers back home. The BBC or Economist reporter, on the other hand, is connecting the dots for folks in the UK, not here. There's a big difference. Third, Wilson is making at least one unverified statement and an erroneous conclusion: (s)he states that "Chicagoans are getting more foreign news than they ever did - just not from the Trib." Oh, really? And just how do you know that? The fact that such news is *theoretically* more available because it's on the Web DOESN'T MEAN THEY'RE ACCESSING THOSE SITES AND READING IT. That's an important distinction. Perhaps some readers have no Web access; others perhaps just don't bother, while still others don't know how to find it (I know for a fact my next door neighbor has no idea where the best foreign reporting can be found on the Web or which media sources provide it, but she does still read the print Trib). The point is that when local papers had foreign bureaus or bigger foreign staffs, those papers made it easy for their readers to find local, national AND international news ***in one place*** -- and because they didn't have to make a big effort to go looking for foreign news, many readers were actually more likely to read foreign news in the past than they are now. Even if he knew how, my other next door neighbor isn't willing to spend the time online looking in 17 different places for foreign news -- but if you make it easy for him by putting in all in one place, say, in a print paper, he'll gladly read it. Then there is that notion that with more people reporting the same news in that same marketplace of ideas, a good approximation of the truth is more likely to come out -- whereas the contraction of news staffs and merger of news outlets into fewer hands just means those fewer outlets have greater control and the result can be more easily manipulated. I don't like fewer voices reporting the news, be it foreign or domestic, or a smaller number of companies controlling a bigger share of that part of the news media that is still considered credible and reliable. Yes, there are so many more voices on the Internet, but so much of what they produce is crap. The difference between competent, reliable, conscientious reporting at its best and most of what's on the Internet is the difference between pure, pristine water and sludge. Who has time or need for sludge?? Not I, thanks. We can't get back all the foreign reportage and bureaus that were. But the question is: what part *can* we get back, how do we finance it, and how do we best get it in front of the most readers in order to serve our public? Because I'm sure niche local-only isn't the right way to go. A teacher of mine once said (and I'm paraphrasing slightly here): Tell your readers what they *absolutely need to know* in order to make intelligent decisions, accurately and in a way that makes it easier for them to get it from you than from anyone else, and they'll keep coming back to you -- because they must. I suspect that will remain true no matter how media platforms or news distribution evolve.

Terrific comments, webdiva. Telling points throughout. Particularly like your observations on web vs. print and how bloody time-consuming and sometimes unproductive surfing the web for news can be. And, as you note, credible online sources (a high percentage of them newspapers) are mingled right in with the garbage, which predominates. If newspapers go exclusively to the web, they'll just get lost in a sea of crap. As for a local perspective on foreign news, I think your overall point is valid, although I've always felt that correspondents sometimes overreach to draw local connections to foreign stories and that such specific elements are too often marginal. More generally, though, I think there's an intangible factor that's quite valuable. Someone from the Midwest reporting overseas might find and focus on elements in a story there that, while not relating specifically to the Midwest, will nonetheless engage Midwestern readers. This doesn't always happen. But one example, and one of my favorites, was Kim Barker at the Tribune, who reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan. She had a distinctive voice and in many stories managed to convey a sense of the sometimes absurd disconnection between Western values and goals in that part of the world and the situation on the ground there. I don't think a reporter for the New York Times of the Economist would necessarily have captured that. Too bad we've lost Barker. But overall, in the case of the Tribune, I don't think the paper as such ever developed a distinctive Midwestern voice on national and international affairs--which is a great shame. The most that can be said is that they showcased voices like those of Kim Barker and Paul Salopek. This in turn lent much greater weight and authority to the Tribune itself. It's all gone now.

I have a very strong suspicion that IAC is actually lee abrams or some other top bozo at the tribune. Any reporter worth his salt should be able to see that whoever it is is pretending to be balanced but with an agenda that no civilian wants to pursue.

@leigh I have the same suspicions about IAC. But fair is fair. There are probably a lot of current and former Trib employees, disgruntled and enraged, who are airing their grief here under labels that keep them completely anonymous. The sad thing, though, is that they have good reason. Under our good old American system of privatized Stalinism, you can be fired for daring to doubt the boss. But not for being the boss, or adoring him. So IAC's anonymity is, perhaps, less than justified, and maybe downright sneaky.

I certainly do wish I was Lee Abrams as I would be making quite a bit more money than I do now. But I assure everyone that I am not him (I had never even heard of him until I saw him mentioned by some of you here) nor anyone else at the Tribune. I do not work for the Tribune and, as far as I remember, basically never even met anyone who does. I will refer people to this thread from April where I state that "I have many misgivings with the way the Tribune is being run" and critisize Zell for "looking like a complete idiot" in an interview he did: http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/news-bites/2009/04/15/can-handsome-plaque-be-redeemed-food-stamps/ (It is the twentieth post on that thread.) Those are not things that someone from Tribune's management would say in order spread their beliefs to this blog. I've said repeatedly that I do not work in the industry. I am just an observer who is very skeptical when people have reactions that seem to me to largely result from a knee-jerk belief that the old way of doing something is always best.